The Most Beautiful Cathedrals in Asia
12 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful cathedrals in Asia are Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Israel), Saint Isaac's Cathedral (Russia) and Etchmiadzin Cathedral (Armenia). The list covers 12 cathedrals in 5 countries. Russia has the most, with 8. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Christianity began in Asia, and its cathedrals here are among the oldest and the most unexpected in the world. In Jerusalem and the Caucasus they mark the faith's first centuries, when Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity. Farther north, Russian builders turned Byzantine models into white-stone carving and gilded domes, and in Persia and Vietnam Christian communities built churches in the language of the architecture around them.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem stands over the sites venerated as the place of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus, and is shared by several Christian denominations under long-standing arrangements. Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia, the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was first built in the early fourth century and is often called the oldest cathedral in the world. The Cathedral of Saint Demetrius in Vladimir, from the end of the twelfth century, is covered in carved limestone reliefs of saints, beasts and plants.
Saint Petersburg contributes three very different churches. Saint Isaac's Cathedral, by Auguste de Montferrand, lifts a gilded dome over porticoes of monolithic granite columns. Smolny Cathedral, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, is a Baroque confection in blue and white, and the Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt follows Hagia Sophia in its great Byzantine dome. Vank Cathedral in Isfahan, built by the Armenian community of New Julfa, hides walls covered in frescoes behind a Persian brick exterior, and Phát Diệm Cathedral in northern Vietnam is built of stone and ironwood with curved roofs like a pagoda.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Church of the Holy Sepulchre | Cathedral | Israel | |
| 2 | Saint Isaac's Cathedral | Cathedral | Russia | ✓ |
| 3 | Etchmiadzin Cathedral | Cathedral | Armenia | ✓ |
| 4 | Cathedral of Saint Demetrius | Cathedral | Russia | ✓ |
| 5 | Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg | Cathedral | Russia | |
| 6 | Smolny Cathedral | Cathedral | Russia | |
| 7 | Vank Cathedral | Cathedral | Iran | |
| 8 | Dormition Cathedral, Vladimir | Cathedral | Russia | ✓ |
| 9 | Dormition Cathedral, Moscow Kremlin | Cathedral | Russia | |
| 10 | Phát Diệm Cathedral | Cathedral | Vietnam | |
| 11 | Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt | Cathedral | Russia | |
| 12 | Saint Sophia Cathedral, Veliky Novgorod | Cathedral | Russia | ✓ |
01 Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Israel · 2.2 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.230° E
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ · CC BY 2.0 The church that visitors enter today is essentially the work of the Crusaders, who took Jerusalem in 1099 and drew the scattered chapels together under one roof in Romanesque style, adding the bell tower; the work was completed in 1149, in the reign of Queen Melisende. The Romanesque entrance façade is theirs, and so are the many small crosses scratched by pilgrims into the walls of the stairway down to the Chapel of Saint Helena. After a fire in 1808 brought down the dome of the rotunda, the Greek architect Nikolaos Komnenos rebuilt it, and the ornate shrine over the tomb itself, the Aedicule, dates from that campaign.
Did you know? Around AD 135 the emperor Hadrian had the site filled in and built a temple to Venus over it.
02 Saint Isaac's Cathedral
Russia · 0.9 km from Saint Petersburg59.934° N 30.306° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Florstein ( Telegram: WikiPhoto.Space ) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The engineering is as much the story as the architecture. The marshy ground had to be stabilised with a forest of timber piles before anything could stand on it. The 112 red granite columns, quarried at Pyterlahti on the Finnish side of the Gulf, were each cut from a single block; the largest portico shafts are 17 metres tall and weigh around 114 tonnes, and they were raised with wooden scaffolding and capstans before the walls went up. The dome rests on a cast-iron frame, and its twelve angels were produced by electrotyping rather than conventional bronze casting, which kept them thin and light.
Did you know? Peter the Great married his second wife Catherine in 1712 in the first, wooden church of Saint Isaac on this site.
03 Etchmiadzin Cathedral
Armenia · 16.6 km from Ashtarak40.162° N 44.291° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Konsek · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building you see is essentially the one raised in 483/4 by Vahan Mamikonian, governor of Persian Armenia, after the first church had been wrecked: a compact cruciform plan with four free-standing pillars carrying a central dome, around 33 by 30 metres and about 34 metres to the top of the dome. Later centuries layered on top of it. The grey stone core is framed by bright red tuff additions of the 17th century — a western belfry begun in 1653 and finished in 1658, then smaller turreted bell towers on the other arms in 1682 — and a sacristy was attached to the east end in 1868.
Did you know? Shah Abbas I planned to move the whole cathedral to New Julfa near Isfahan; in the end only some stones were taken, and fifteen remain in the church there.
04 Cathedral of Saint Demetrius
Russia · 0.1 km from Vladimir56.129° N 40.411° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 4.0 It looks at first like other white-stone churches of the region, a single-domed cube on four piers with three bays to a side. What makes it unique is the carving. Around 600 reliefs cover the upper half of the walls and the drum, a dense crowd of saints, lions, griffins, birds, plants and patterns. King David presides in the central arch of the west front, among angels and fantastic beasts, and again on the south front among warrior saints; Solomon, Hercules and Alexander the Great also appear, and on the north side Vsevolod himself is shown with his sons.
Did you know? So densely carved are its walls that the cathedral has been nicknamed the 'white-stone book'.
05 Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg
Russia · 1 km from Saint Petersburg59.950° N 30.317° E
Image by LuidmilaKot from Pixabay The cathedral is above all a necropolis. Nearly every Russian emperor and empress from Peter the Great to Nicholas II is buried here, in tombs set across the floor of the nave; Peter II, who died in Moscow, and the murdered Ivan VI are the exceptions. In 1998 remains identified by a state commission as those of Nicholas II, members of his family and their servants were interred in the side chapel of St Catherine. The Danish-born Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had died in exile, was reburied here beside her husband Alexander III in 2006. Next to the cathedral stands the Grand Ducal Burial Vault, built for the wider imperial family.
06 Smolny Cathedral
Russia · 4.6 km from Saint Petersburg59.949° N 30.396° E
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay The convent was conceived for Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great. Passed over in the succession, she had at one point planned to retire into monastic life, but the coup of 1741 brought her to the throne instead, and the project became an imperial foundation. Rastrelli worked on it from 1748 to 1764. His design also included a colossal bell tower over the entrance, meant to be the tallest structure in Saint Petersburg and in all of Russia at the time, but after Elizabeth died in 1762 the money ran out and the tower was never built. Catherine the Great, who preferred the new Neoclassical taste, showed little interest in finishing the church.
Did you know? Rastrelli's unbuilt bell tower was planned at about 140 metres, taller than the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
07 Vank Cathedral
Iran · 8.4 km from Isfahan32.635° N 51.656° E
Rasool abbasi17 · CC BY-SA 4.0 New Julfa owes its existence to Shah Abbas I, who in the early seventeenth century forcibly resettled hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Julfa on the Araxes and gave them land beside his new capital, valuing them as merchants and craftsmen. Work on the cathedral began in 1606, and between 1655 and 1664 it was substantially rebuilt under Archbishop David. Its plan reflects that double world: a domed hall like a Persian mosque, joined to a raised chancel and semi-octagonal apse in the manner of a Western church.
Did you know? The museum keeps that early press equipment together with the first book ever printed in Iran.
08 Dormition Cathedral, Vladimir
Russia · 0.3 km from Vladimir56.127° N 40.409° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by pride1979 from Pixabay The cathedral is built of the white stone that defines the medieval architecture of Vladimir and Suzdal, and its outer walls are covered with elaborate carving. The cathedral survived the Mongol capture of Vladimir in 1238, although much of the city burned. Andrei, Vsevolod and other rulers of the principality were buried inside.
09 Dormition Cathedral, Moscow Kremlin
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.751° N 37.617° E
Никонико962 · CC BY-SA 4.0 That mix of Italian Renaissance engineering and old Russian form is visible everywhere. Outside, the walls are well-trimmed blocks of white stone, and five domes stand on top — a design that became a template for churches all over Russia. Inside, Fioravanti replaced the massive piers usual in Russian churches with four slender round columns, so the interior feels unusually open and even.
10 Phát Diệm Cathedral
Vietnam · 21 km from Ninh Bình20.093° N 106.080° E
Kien1980v at Vietnamese Wikipedia · Public domain The complex was the life's work of the parish priest Trần Lục, known to the French as Père Six. Work began in 1875 and the main church was finished in 1891, with the surrounding buildings added over the following years: five chapels dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (1883), the Sacred Heart (1889), Saint Roch (1895), Saint Joseph and Saint Peter (both 1896), and a square hall with the bell tower in 1899. The whole ensemble, together with grottoes, a memorial house and a covered stone bridge from the nineteenth century, spreads over roughly 15 acres in the town of Phát Diệm, Kim Sơn District, Ninh Bình Province. A statue of the Sacred Heart stands in the lake before the façade.
Did you know? Before construction began, the ground was raised by about a metre with packed earth to give the buildings a firm base.
11 Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt
Russia · 30.5 km from Saint Petersburg59.992° N 29.778° E
Florstein ( Telegram: WikiPhoto.Space ) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The architect Vasily Kosyakov travelled to Constantinople and Greece in 1900–1901 to study Byzantine buildings at first hand, and he took the proportions of Hagia Sophia as his model. The site was dedicated in October 1901, the foundation walls were laid in May 1903, the structure was complete by 1907, and the cathedral was consecrated on 10 June 1913. The result is often regarded as the culmination of the Late Neo-Byzantine style in Russia: a compact, centralised mass crowned by a single great cupola, with an interior of about 3,000 square metres able to hold some 5,000 worshippers. Its interior measures about 77 by 54 metres.
Did you know? The design brief demanded that the cathedral's cross be the first thing sailors saw as their ships approached Kronstadt from the sea.
12 Saint Sophia Cathedral, Veliky Novgorod
Russia · 4 km from Veliky Novgorod58.522° N 31.277° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by pride1979 from Pixabay For four centuries the cathedral was the symbol of the Novgorod Republic, a merchant state that stretched from the Baltic towards the Urals. Chronicles record the citizens declaring that where Holy Wisdom is, there is Novgorod. The church was the burial place of princes, mayors and prelates, beginning with Vladimir himself in 1052, and it was looted by Ivan the Terrible's men in the 1570s when Moscow crushed the city's independence. It survived the German occupation in the Second World War, though its domes were badly damaged; the cross from the main dome was taken to Spain and returned only in 2004.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful cathedrals in Asia?
- On our list, Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Israel) ranks first, followed by Saint Isaac's Cathedral (Russia) and Etchmiadzin Cathedral (Armenia).
- Which country has the most cathedrals in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Russia (8), Armenia (1) and Iran (1).
- What is the oldest cathedral in the world?
- Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Vagharshapat, Armenia, is widely regarded as the oldest. It was first built in the early fourth century, soon after Armenia adopted Christianity as its state religion, and was rebuilt in the following centuries.
- Who designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral?
- The French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand. Construction took about forty years, from 1818 to 1858, and the cathedral's porticoes rest on monolithic columns of red granite.
- Why does Phát Diệm Cathedral look like a pagoda?
- It was built in the late nineteenth century under the priest Trần Lục, who adapted Catholic church design to Vietnamese architecture. Its stone and ironwood halls have the curved tiled roofs and carving of a traditional Vietnamese temple.
- How many cathedrals are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 12 cathedrals in 5 countries. Russia has the most, with 8.